The future of TV isn’t TV, it’s broadband.

[Commentary] As government strives to keep up with the broadband age, the Senate’s Commerce Committee held a hearing today covering the future of television, but midway through the hearing I realized that the Senate has it all wrong. The future of TV isn’t to be found in deregulation — it’s on the Internet. We just have to let it happen. And to do that, Congress needs to look at how broadband providers control access to content, through caps, specialized offerings and deals. Unfortunately, Congress didn’t do all of that. It danced around the problems of pipe owners also owning content providers and pay TV distribution businesses. It didn’t ask about caps on broadband and how that serves the interests of the pay TV business, and despite the fact that network neutrality was brought up several times and was cited by Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC, and Amazon’s public policy lead Paul Misener, the way that Comcast is sidestepping network neutrality by not counting content streamed over the Xbox against its data cap was never mentioned.

Instead the call during the hearing was for a rewrite of the 1996 Telecoms Act, which deregulated the telecommunications agency, helped establish the rules that let the Internet grow and brought about the rise of competitive local exchange carriers. But in an election year, such a rewrite seems unlikely, and frankly, worrisome given the power that ISPs and content companies have in Washington at the moment. Instead, the law that might make headway is the The Next Generation Television Marketplace Act, which was proposed in December, and was the basis for the hearing.